| I've been a software dev for almost three decades and manager the last few years of it. I've been looking for work for over 6 months. Granted, I'm trying to move back to SWE work but have been somewhat opeN to EM work. Finding work is harder than 2008 and even harder than 2001. It's as bad as tech has ever seen. For EMs, middle management is always the first to get culled. That was me. And there are about 10% or less EM roles to engineer roles. No one has said it but my management years away from daily coding likely count against me. What more, I'm seeing far fewer Staff+ roles now than in the past several years. Anecdotally, from a recent employer, I had the impression that company was attempting to hire fewer staff+ to (1) outsource more and (2) hire more people at lower levels and (3) both 1 and 2 together. The net effect in the US is seeing many more "senior" roles (we love our title inflation in Tech where "senior" tends to mean "has more than 2 years experience") or extremely specialized roles where exceptionally few people would have the skill set at the required experience level. The VCs and the bigger firms evidently were heavily leveraged in low interest rate loans. Raising rates meant less money to play with and lower profits. Employees are the biggest cost center so that's where companies cut. Without significantly lower interest rates, I suspect Tech is going to experience something of a depression in terms of unemployed/under-employed software developers. |
I bet they do, but when you get engaged again in SWE, I bet it haunts you still. I am thankfully employed and hoping to stay that way and ride out my final career years in my current org. Similarly I have been in tech nearing four decades but over the last 10 years made a conscious effort to exit technology management (was tired of managing people and all the BS that means) and moved into product management which I personally enjoy more.
I am often asked why I don’t show more ambition to lead people because of my past experience. Well, it’s because of my past experience.